Reading Ingarden read Husserl Metaphysics, ontology, and phenomenological method.pdf

Husserl Studies 10: 211-236, 1994.
© 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in herlands.
Reading Ingarden read Husserl: Metaphysics, ontology,
and phenomenological method
LEO BOSTAR
Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York
How great the temptation is to misunderstand oneself and
how much - indeed, ultimately, the actual ess of a
transcendental philosophy - depends upon self-reflective
clarity carried to its limits.
Edmund HusserP
Of Husserl's many distinguished students and assistants few, with the possible
exception of Eugen Fink, maintained as rating a dialogue with transcen-
dental phenomenology as did Roman Ingarden. And yet, despite an interest
which spanned half a century, from quite early on, and well before many
others raised the red flag of subjectivism, Ingarden expressed serious reserva-
tions about the idealist tendencies implicit in Husserl's philosophical project.
Although in this essay I would like to examine some of the more salient rea-
sons behind Ingarden's critical reading of Husserl's purported "idealizing de-
valuation of the status of the world," my interest is not antiquarian. Rather, I
propose returning to Ingarden's critique as a means of addressing the larger
question ofphenomenology's relation to metaphysics and ontology. Thus, how-
ever the question of the proper reading of Husserl's stated position is ulti-
mately decided, whether or not an idealist position can be credibly attributed
to him, the significance of Ingarden's incisive questioning can neither be dis-
missed nor ignored as narrow text-analysis. For if idealism i n some genuinely
ontologically reductive sense2 is implicit to transcendental phenomenology,
then this fact alone would provide an opening for a wholesale reappraisal of
the transcendental turn, Husserl' s program, and the philosophical tradition which
it has made possible. The reader of Husserl, therefore, must address not one
but